Logistical Hurdles Paralyze Relief Effort at the Center of a Typhoon’s Fury

Slide Show | Distress Grows for Philippine Typhoon Victims Even as an enormous global aid effort gathered momentum, international officials expressed concern that delays could prevent supplies from reaching survivors of Typhoon Haiyan for days.

Tyler Hicks / The New York Times

By KEITH BRADSHER and RICK GLADSTONE

November 13, 2013

TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Typhoon gridlock threatened rescue operations in the most devastated part of the Philippines on Wednesday, with aid piling up but few ways to distribute it, plentiful gasoline but no merchants willing to sell it, and an influx of emergency volunteers but no place to house them.

The intensifying frustrations of delivering aid after Typhoon Haiyan struck last week elicited a plea from the top United Nations relief official to the mayor of Tacloban, imploring him to persuade gas station owners to open so relief convoys could begin a large-scale expansion into the flattened port city of 220,000 and interior regions of Leyte Province. The gas stations have fuel in their tanks, but the owners fear theft and violence if they reopen.

“We have to have fuel, so we have to have some kind of refueling center,” Valerie Amos, the United Nations official, told the mayor, Alfred S. Romualdez, at a public meeting after she flew here for an assessment.

Mr. Romualdez told Ms. Amos that the city could not easily cope with the influx of aid workers, as practically no vehicles were available to bring them in from the airport, while food and drinking water were running out. “I’m asking those who come here, ‘Please be self-sufficient, because there’s nothing,’ ” he said.

The mayor’s best advice to residents was to leave and find shelter with relatives if they could, saying that the local authorities were struggling to provide food and water and faced difficulties in maintaining law and order.

The paralysis was epitomized by the first attempt in Tacloban to conduct a mass burial of typhoon victims, whose corpses had been putrefying for days on the streets and under piles of debris. The attempt ended in failure as trucks carrying more than 200 corpses were forced to turn back when they faced gunfire at the city limits. The identities of the gunmen were not clear.

Covered with black plastic tarpaulin, the bodies were returned to a makeshift outdoor morgue at the foot of the hill topped by City Hall, where they emitted a powerful odor in the tropical heat.

Tacloban’s paralysis was acknowledged later in the day by the United States government, which is playing a major role in the emergency effort, using military cargo planes to bring in aid and to evacuate the most vulnerable residents. In a telephone briefing from Washington, a senior official assigned to the effort said that it was focused mainly on food, water, shelter and medicine, but that the provision of fuel in the city was “very much on our radar screen — that is a whole part of the logistical morass we’re working our way through.”

Another senior American official in the briefing said that the number of American uniformed personnel on the ground in the Philippines, currently at about 300, would rise to 1,000 in the next few days, with most coming from a Marine base in Okinawa, Japan. The official said the United States was helping transport Filipino soldiers assigned to the disaster zone, which cuts through the middle of the country.

The American officials also said a land route into Tacloban had been reopened, which would ease the bottleneck at the airport. “It was like squeezing orange juice through a straw,” one said. “Now we have more straws.”

International relief groups said they were rapidly escalating their response in Tacloban and elsewhere. Doctors Without Borders, the Paris-based medical agency, said its teams had traveled by car, boat, plane and helicopter to some of the outlying areas of northern Cebu Island, eastern Samar Island, Panay Island and western Leyte Province, which neither the Philippine government nor other agencies had been able to reach. The teams found desperation, the group said in a statement. The village of Guiuan in Samar was flattened and half of Roxas City on Panay was destroyed.

“Access is extremely difficult and is preventing people from receiving help,” said Dr. Natasha Reyes, the group’s emergency coordinator in the Philippines.

Families living on the second floor of a building lit by candlelight in Tacloban.

Tyler Hicks / The New York Times

Despite the problems in Tacloban, the World Food Program said Wednesday that it had managed to provide family-size packets of rice and canned goods to nearly 50,000 residents and that 500 tons of rice was en route.

Mayor Romualdez said the city desperately needed trucks and drivers to distribute shipments of food piling up at the airport, as well as more trucks, heavy equipment and personnel to retrieve decaying corpses from the wreckage across the city.

“I have to decide at every meeting which is more important, relief goods or picking up cadavers,” he said.

The mayor, a nephew of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady who grew up in Tacloban, denied persistent rumors of gunfights among the increasingly hungry and thirsty population, saying that business owners and others were firing only warning shots. “That’s why sometimes you hear gunshots, but it is to ward off looting,” he said.

Jerry T. Yaokasin, the vice mayor, said in an interview that Filipino soldiers and police officers might be stretched too thin to provide security in Tacloban even as they try to reach other coastal communities to assess damage. He suggested that foreign forces might be needed for work like providing security for gas stations to reopen.

“If the United States will come in, if it will be allowed to come, or if the United Nations can come in, it will really help us secure the city,” he said.

An official in Washington said it was unlikely that the American military would be used in this way. “It’s really a host government issue — they need to tackle this,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

With service stations closed, gasoline and diesel fuel, at any price, have almost completely disappeared, immobilizing aid vehicles and private cars alike. Scavengers have already siphoned fuel from the large numbers of vehicles crushed, overturned or abandoned.

The typhoon did not just destroy the electricity grid here. The storm surge, when the sea level rose by as much as 13 feet in minutes, disabled most of the city’s generators, Mr. Yaokasin said, and the lack of fuel has limited operations for the remaining units.

With food stripped from the shelves of many grocery stores, surviving store owners are refusing to bring in new supplies and reopen their stores, Mr. Yaokasin said.

“The police visibility has to be there to the point that businesses feel the security to open their businesses,” he said.

The death toll remained a mystery. The Philippine government put the official toll at 2,275 as of Wednesday. Few deaths have been confirmed in Tacloban because officials say they are counting only bodies that they have collected or formally recorded.

But Mr. Yaokasin said the leader of a single neighborhood of 4,000 had notified him that a quarter of the residents had died.

Jennifer Cicco, the Philippines Red Cross administrator for Leyte Island, said thousands of people were missing and were presumed to have been swept out to sea. Arié Lévy, the president of Rescuers Without Borders, a French nonprofit group, said he had visited a village a mile beyond Tacloban on Wednesday morning and estimated that he saw a thousand bodies.

Keith Bradsher reported from Tacloban, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Austin Ramzy contributed reporting from Cebu, the Philippines, and Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong.